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Holden Caulfield Pessimism Analysis

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The Inner Mechanisms of Holden Caulfield In the 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, it is outright transparent that the narrator
Holden Caulfield, whose oddities include mentally branding everyone around him as “phonies” and constantly critiquing his surroundings with the utmost cynicism, is living in complete isolation. Author J.D. Salinger implements countless instances of gloomy and unstable inner-dialogue from the mind of Holden to convey to readers the various aspects of undying pessimism within the brain of this significantly damaged teenager. Analyzing this novel and the depths of the main character is crucial to truly comprehending the meaning of the work as a whole, as well as the reason behind Holden’s grave outlook on life. While …show more content…

The analysis begins with the childhood of the character. Did they have a good home life? Were they well nourished and loved? Childhood is the basis of everything, and it can ultimately alter a person’s life forever if it consists of traumatic events. As the character is introduced, fundamentals of the [character’s] childhood are revealed. The reader begins to discover and determine how the character’s life as a child was, and can therefore identify certain events that may have taken place and caused the character extreme distress. Trauma in a young person can cause them to build up emotional walls, otherwise known as defenses. The “defenses or core issues” are “selective perceptions, selective memory, denial, avoidance, displacement, projection, regression and active reversal”. The child blocks the memories out because they are too painful to endure again, which prompts the child to become numb to any, if not all, signs of positive outreach from another human being. This all stems from what may be “fear of loss, fear of betrayal”, and so on. In Holden Caulfield’s case, it is clear that his brother’s death at a young age had a deep psychological effect on him, the pain pushing him so far as to actually break all the windows in the garage on the night of Allie’s death, which then induces Holden to be

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